


Cross Quarter

by lferion



Category: Darkover series - Marion Zimmer Bradley
Genre: Dream Sex, F/M, First Time, Introspection, M/M, Missing Scene, Yuletide, Yuletide 2010
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-24
Updated: 2010-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-14 00:49:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/143489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lferion/pseuds/lferion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It started with a dream, startlingly erotic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cross Quarter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sanj](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sanj/gifts).



> This story largely falls in the philosophical/metaphorical gaps between and in Spell Sword and Forbidden Tower -- Andrew attempting to look at one of the biggest elephants in the room.
> 
> My thanks to Linnea for making this much better than it would otherwise have been.

* * *

  


  
**I**   


  


* * *

It started with a dream, startlingly erotic: Andrew entwined in eager limbs, another body warm around him, kisses feathering across his face, breath and lip and tongue-tip touching, tasting, trailing sparks from cheek to chin, the soft point at the corner of his jaw, drawing lines of fire down his neck, around to find and suckle at his nape, the place where skull met spine that only lovers touched. His lover was a Darkovan, with flame-red hair (too short to be Callista’s, Ellemir’s, too long for … someone else) and clever, knowing hands that roused and soothed and roused again to achingly hard need, while never touching Andrew’s cock (as if that touch wanted waking and explicit leave - which even in his sleep he thought was … odd). It was a dream; he could respond, no matter that the limbs were long and muscled, the shoulders broad beneath his own exploring hand, a bar of heat pressed firm against his flank.

Andrew moved within the dream, cheeks greeting fingers that squeezed and explored, hips making circles, his own hands finding spots that made the other person sigh and shift and stiffen more. It was a dream, detached, unreal; he could enjoy the ribbon of sensation that spun between his legs, behind his balls, a spark that flickered against places that had never felt a touch, igniting nerves to unimagined need. He writhed against the other, craving more with no idea what it was he wanted. The dream-mouth at his nape moved to his ear, hands stilling, holding him just on the cusp of release.

“Oh yes, you will do well” Andrew seemed to hear, more thought than words, not even (it seemed) intended for his hearing. Then, unmistakably directed at him, a clear mental voice eerily like and unlike Damon's spoke, "Care well for my kinsman, A'andra (man-beloved). He has need of you, elsewise and in this," - Andrew's balls tightened, his cock throbbed, so close - “he does not know. And the world has need of him, of all of you. Love _is_ enough, applied aright.” A wash of strong, gold-green-bright feeling shimmered through him, as if his soul had been given a kiss of ineffable affection, and he arched into it. “And know that you _are_ loved.” Exquisite heat flared along his nerves, burned at root and throat and crown, between his eyes, glowed hot in belly, breast and groin. It sent him careening over the edge, orgasm convulsing through him.

Andrew came to himself, waking breathless, shaken, thighs sticky-wet and a tingling pulse still beating in his ass. The ghost-touch of soft lips on Andrew’s forehead lingered warm as a blessing. Every detail of the dream was present, etched clear in his mind. Including a last sense-impression of a man who was different from Damon only in unwounded confidence, untrammeled integration of body-spirit-mind: flame and alabaster, growing green and airy gold, as beautiful and whole as Damon ought to be.

Ought to be, and wasn’t. Needing Andrew in ways he couldn’t say, did not know. Damon, needing, loving, _wanting_ him. Carnal need, not at all platonic.

That hadn’t, exactly, been a dream. That man-not-Damon had been _real_ , with power like Damon’s, in kind, in precision, in degree, but free of barbed constraint, reined by will, not fear. And positively gleeful about enjoying sex with men. Unlike Damon. But Damon wasn’t _gleeful_ about anything, so far as Andrew knew. And he’d never said a word of his own response to other men, except to deftly turn the subject the one time it came up. _That first, astonishing four-fold fusion, all one, not four, not two-and-two…._ Maybe not unlike in that either, then.

An image flashed through his mind, of Damon (or not-Damon - did it matter?) coming, arching, crying out, ass clenching on Andrew’s cock, seed spurting in his hand, gloriously free. Andrew flushed down to his toes. He hadn’t known he could even imagine such an act, much less in sensory detail. His mind shied from the thought. It wasn’t as though he didn’t know that men slept with men, women with women - of course he did, but the knowledge had been irrelevant to him, applied only to others, not himself. He had, before now, never once thought of himself in that context. It was new, and odd, and uncomfortable. But not, as he might have thought, had he been asked, repulsive, or able to be denied. The evidence of that was still humming in his nerves, present on his thighs.

Andrew flopped back against his pillows, aware of his body as he rarely was, rarely had let himself be. Aware too of the small sounds of the great house around him: servants at their morning tasks, the distant clash of men at practice in the courtyard, felt more than heard the roar of Dom Esteban upbraiding some hapless soul, and an unaccustomed sense of solitude, an almost-emptiness where three others should be immediately to hand, and weren’t.

Damon had left days ago to lead the guardsmen in harrying the cat-people out of the Kilghard Hills, the guest-room he had been given empty of even an echo of his presence. Callista and Ellemir’s room was on the far side of the sprawling house, and they had both been up betimes, seeing to the mysterious, myriad duties of running an estate, managing wounded men, things Andrew knew he could - and would - learn to understand, help with, be part of, but right now he was more hindrance than help, especially with Damon unavailable to mediate his ignorance. He’d gone early to bed, carrying the memory of Ellemir’s swift hug, Callista’s finger-tip touch to his cheek, intimate as a kiss, and now was far too wakeful to sleep again.

Perhaps the little distance was a gift, an hour to think through without interruption what he had learned in the past weeks of himself and the people closer to him than anyone had ever been in his life. All too soon there would be the clatter and clamor of horses in the forecourt, and work enough for everyone.

* * *

Over the next frantic months Andrew’s thoughts came together in scatters and snatches, as the four of them set the foundations of their unexpected, upstart Tower, fought for their love, their sanity, their right to be together and do the Work that cried out to be done.

***

They were not two dyads but a quartet, every one connected to every other one, bonds of love and trust, attraction and desire. Oh, not all physical, but never say that there was not affinity between the twins, or between Damon and Callista in their shared understanding of both inclusion and exile from Tower life. Andrew shared with Ellemir a love and understanding of being outside of that, of knowing there were things about their primary partners (and there he was, his mind already making space in his thoughts for more-than-one partner) that they could never fully share, as well as being united in a kind of pragmatism and wry acknowledgement that they would be the ones to exercise restraint, to be the final curb on the flights of two whose minds were far stronger than their bodies. (Not that their flesh was weak or fragile by any sensible measure, but that their gifts were disproportionately strong, and too much of their training had taught them to disregard the body as anything beyond an engine for the mind.)

And really, you would think that Damon, being the eldest of them by several years, would have more sense, but it seemed that having been freed from the worst of the crippling fear and conviction of being fundamentally flawed, inadequate and worthless, had far less desire - or even notion - than Callista (half his age) did of proper attention to physical need beyond rank survival. It was as if, for all his years of living in it, he had never learned to love, or have a care for, his physical self. Even now it was in intellect that Damon was most self assured. And really, he was quite terrifyingly bright, when he wasn’t over-thinking and second-guessing himself.

There were times (and this was one of them) when Andrew found himself ferociously angry with the people who had damaged Damon so. Angrier even than Ellemir, because he could not see the _sense_ in it, was outsider enough to have a completely different way of looking at the entire situation, see the gaps that internalized myth and lore and rigid, ancient tradition papered over, ignored or had long forgotten. How was Damon _less_ a man because he held the lightning in his hands? Because he could discern a difference between two crystals cleft from the same core, or between desire to intend and actual intent, when the intendee did not know themselves? That might set him apart from the ordinary run of humanity, but it had nothing to do with _manhood_ as he called it, with masculinity or potency or for whom and how one might express desire.

Which brought him to the last connection, the one he’d been shying from, trying to ignore, or if not ignore, attenuate. The bond between himself and Damon. Within scant hours of acquaintance Andrew had been more deeply in sync (rapport was the technical term for it, but he hadn’t known that then) with Damon than he had ever been with another person, any time in his life. Need had inspired - demanded - the attempt. Need alone would have allowed Damon (too perceptive, too sensitive for his own good — a micro-precision receiver-synthesizer in a cat-whisker radio world) to get the information they needed from Andrew’s memories, but it was sympathy, affinity, some quirk or untapped knack in Andrew that had latched onto that touch/probe, that took to it and matched it, and let him, entirely untaught, see straight through into Damon, entirely bypassing what Andrew now knew to be intricate and otherwise effective shields.

—Andrew was beginning to suspect that at least one of those barriers had been put there by another, imposed, not merely taught as Damon and Callista both said. Some of those knots and walls and thought-traps seemed intended to keep something in at least as firmly as keep others out. He didn’t want to think that, especially as much as Damon still felt for Leonie, but it kept coming back. As did the memory of _He needs_ and _He does not know_. What were the ones in charge afraid of, that they insisted so hard on rigid and artificial binaries of gender, of abstinence, absolutes that humans just didn’t come with? But that was a problem Andrew really couldn’t address. Not now. Not _yet_. Get through the fight to stay together first. —

Yes, Damon had been open in order to see Andrew’s memories that they might rescue Callista, but not that open. Not exposing wounds that had bled for longer than Callista had been alive; hurts so deep that Damon curled around them and did not know he curled, cramped and out of true; pain so ever-present it had long since gone invisible, like air. _No one_ let an alien, a perfect stranger, see that kind of thing. He hadn’t known what he was seeing, overwhelmed with everything else, had pieced it out of memory, tested it in subsequent, more controlled rapports. As far as Andrew could tell the thing that let him perceive through and around those corners was the same thing that had let Callista come to him in the first place, when she could not reach any of the minds she knew. A different wavelength, a different paradigm. Something.

But the end result was that he could find Damon even when Damon emphatically did not want to be found. Could read the strain-lines and stress-fractures that Callista could not see - lines some of which marked her as well, giving weight to Andrew’s nascent theory about imposed … constraints. Callista had been distressed when Andrew - thinking he was imagining things, having no key to the map he was seeing - told her about them. She had cried for Damon ( _Oh, that I could see to mend them!_ ) when she would not, could not find tears for herself. Many of those wounds were beginning to heal, now that they had won through the battle to be themselves, hold and wield their own power. Varzil’s mantle placed rightly on Damon’s shoulders, owned and accepted, his fitness acknowledged by everyone that mattered had undone the deepest, but not the oldest hurt. That one still bled.

Andrew now knew that Damon wanted him (a concept that had quite literally never before crossed Andrew’s mind before that revelatory dream, which said something about his own upbringing and cultural programming, now didn’t it?). He knew that a part of Damon wanted and recoiled from the desire to be met and matched and _taken_ , fucked and filled and swept away on pure sensation, uncontrolled. That desire sat too close to ancient pain to be acknowledged. And — and this was the true nub of the thing — he … wanted Damon. He wanted … to be the one who took, fucked, filled him and gave him that release, then held him in the aftermath, curled close in love and comfort.

And someday (again not now, not yet, but yes, someday) he knew he would want the same himself. It was hard even thinking that in words, but all of it was true. All the more true for being looked at in these moments of meditative space that resisted self deception. It was a desire separate and different from what he felt and had with Callista, not in competition but in parallel. Both aroused him, filled his cock, (when he allowed the thought at all), but differently. And as a further stepping out from the things he once thought he understood as universal rules, both Callista and Ellemir were not only accepting of the idea, they were positively _encouraging_. When in Rome … but this wasn’t Rome, this was Katmandu.

* * *

  


  
**II**   


  


* * *

When the four of them had been back from Thendara a little over a week, Callista pressed a wide-mouthed jar of unscented unguent into Andrew’s hand and shooed him from their room, clad only in his chamber-robe. “Ellie and I are going to be sisters tonight, not wives. You can sleep with Damon. Or, not-sleep.” Her look was loving and a little mischievous, her voice level, and it was perfectly obvious that she was not going to change her mind. “Use that. Use plenty.”

Andrew looked at the jar in his hand, poking one finger in to test the stuff. It was cool and slick and pleasant on his skin. It took him a moment to fully realize what she was saying, what the stuff was for. He opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out. Blood raced to his cock, pulsed in his ass. He could feel his blush burn from head to toe. He swallowed, acutely aware that Callista knew exactly what he was feeling.

She smiled up at him, drew his face down to kiss, warm but chaste. “You need to close the circuit, make the last connection. Not just in sync, rapport, but joined fully each to each. You two have been dancing around this for months. No more dancing. Time to _do_. Ellemir has done her part.”

Andrew looked over to see Ellemir in the doorway, grinning at him with a perfectly straight face. His own face heated once more. They were both entirely lovely and beloved, and not at all what he wanted right now. He was surprised he wasn’t more surprised. _Embarrassed_ yes, but everything felt like it was coming right. Finish the circle. Yes.

“He’s waiting” and “We love you” and “He loves you” and “Try not to break the bed” all chimed in his ears, overlapping and embracing. The last — in Ellemir’s driest tone — surprised a bark of laughter from him, and he blushed _again_.

“Go” Callista said with authority. “I will ward us all. What passes between you will be yours alone, unless and until you choose to share it with us.”

Feeling Callista’s mental push between his shoulder-blades, Andrew stepped across the hall, through to the room Damon and Ellemir shared, and closed the door behind him. The chamber was dimmer than the hallway, lit by a single wide-branched candelabra and a fire crackling on the hearth. For a moment he stood, back against the broad, carved panels, eyes closed. His heart jumped in his throat. He could feel Damon’s presence, the gentle snick as Callista closed the ward that she had promised, the sisters now subtly apart from the two of them, all enclosed.

“Andrew,” said Damon, careful with the consonants, giving him the name as he had heard it nearly all his life. “Ann’dra,” he said again, the softer, liquid intonation of the Darkovan form. “Bredhu.” There was the smallest catch in Damon’s voice, a depth of feeling, imperfectly concealed, that Andrew had heard before but not known what he heard.

Andrew opened his eyes. “Damon,” he breathed. “Bredhu.” He met Damon’s eyes.

There was love in Damon’s face, appreciation and a little apprehension, but finally, _finally_ , no fear. Andrew wondered how Ellemir had managed it, what she had said. Wondered, fleetingly, what his own eyes said, that Damon moved from where he stood beside the fire, hair burning red and all of him beautiful, face and form and generous cock that shifted full and heavy between his thighs, revealed by his unfastened robe and came to meet him half-way. Damon took the jar from Andrew’s hand, put it on the table by the bed and closed the small distance between them, putting his hands to Andrew’s breast and looking up at him, serious and open.

“Is this what you want?” Damon asked, with the tiny lift of his chin that told Andrew that this was not easy for him, but neither was it forced. There were no barriers between them. Damon had lowered his shields, even put aside his starstone. His throat looked strangely vulnerable without it, more naked than his unclothed sex. Andrew could feel/see the quick rhythm of his pulse, racing through them both.

Andrew nodded, his throat tightening, their closeness making his own cock jump. “Yes,” he managed. “And you?” He could feel Damon’s body wanting him now, an extraordinary thing, but he needed to hear it, consent of mind and spirit, as well as flesh.

“Oh, yes,” said Damon, closing his eyes and biting his lip as a wave of desire shivered through him.

It dawned on Andrew that in this, as in other things, Damon knew nothing of half-measures. All or nothing, and this was all, giving himself entire to Andrew’s need, to the completion - consecration - consummation of the bond between them. Nothing for it but to do the same in return. He put his own hands on Damon’s shoulders, feeling the thick knap of the cloth tickle his palms. He wanted suddenly, fiercely, to push the robe from Damon’s shoulders, feel skin, not wool, let fall his own robe and press Damon to the bed, skin to skin all over.

“Yes, oh, yes.”

Andrew did not know whose throat was making those needy noises, only that Damon’s hands were doing Andrew’s will, unfastening and pulling wide, letting cloth fall heedless to the floor. A quick wriggle and both were standing naked, limned in fire- and candlelight, more the same than different in desire. Then they were on the bed, Damon spread beneath him, wanton and revealed. It didn’t matter than he’d never done quite this before — the only wrong would be not to do at all. With love, any touch they chose was right, and only exploration would find what pleased the most, what tickled and what roused.

For a long moment Andrew lay holding Damon in a fierce embrace, suddenly overwhelmed. Then Damon pushed at him and twisted and their positions were reversed, Andrew on his back and Damon smiling down at him, flushed and breathless. “Dance or wrestle?” Damon asked, laughing.

The tightness in Andrew’s chest burst forth into joy, all thought of anything but this moment and this man and what they could make together banished from his mind. “Both” Andrew said, reaching to thread his hands through Damon’s hair — as he discovered he had longed to do — and pull him close to kiss him.

***

And when, after some fumbles and much laughter, sighs and gasps and grunts of pleasure, cries of ecstasy, sobs of release, Andrew lay replete and limp, still sheathed in Damon, with Damon heavy in his arms, shuddering breath slowing, easing into sleep, he knew, with astonished happiness, that here too was home.

Andrew felt a kiss ghost against his forehead, saw Damon half-smile, heard not-quite with his ears the voice he now knew to be Varzil’s — _“Indeed you are not four, but one: a circle quartered and cross-quartered, all complete.”_

No dream but love, all present, theirs to hold.

* * *


End file.
